We had been married for several years when my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family. If it had only been that easy.

Month after month we rode an emotional roller coaster. The highs of hope and the depths of despair… over and over again, until we grew tired of the ride and decided it was time to get off. God obviously didn’t want us to be parents.

Thankfully, He didn’t let us stay there. Eventually God brought us around to the idea of adoption, and today I can’t imagine having built my family the old-fashioned way. These are my kids, and I love them beyond reason.

It just took a change in my perspective.

The Israelites had the same kind of problem. For several hundred years they lived far away from the land God promised Abraham, eventually becoming slaves to a wicked pharaoh.

Take a minute and try to imagine what it would be like to have brutal slave drivers force you to work day in and day out with few supplies, trying to wear you down with crushing labor. You didn’t just have to make bricks, you had to work the fields too. Meanwhile, Pharaoh has ordered all the baby boys be thrown into the Nile.

Devastating is a word that comes to mind. That… and absolutely hopeless.

In Exodus 2:23 the Bible says…

“Years passed, and the king of Egypt died. But the Israelites continued to groan under their burden of slavery. They cried out for help, and their cry rose up to God.”

They had to have felt abandoned by the God of their ancestors, leaving them for dead in a foreign land.

And yet.. God was still in control.

He told Abraham centuries earlier that all of this would happen… and he ended up delivering the Israelites out of the land of Egypt in a most miraculous way.

What about Esther? She was snatched from her home and sent to live with a bunch of other women behind the walls of the palace without access to her family. If that wasn’t bad enough, she was pampered and preened and then forced to sleep with the king. Her only hope was that if he didn’t like her enough to marry her, he would at least keep her around. Can you imagine how scared she must have felt that first night. How absolutely alone?

Or what about the Israelites during the Roman occupation? As the Romans burned the temple to the ground in 70 A.D., the people must have been terrified and desperate as they watched their beloved city and temple burn.

All throughout Scripture, Israel dealt with wicked kings, false prophets, and occupying forces over and over again… yet God was still there. He wasn’t surprised by any of those circumstances. He wasn’t taken off guard. He didn’t have a moment of doubt or indecision. He never left or abandoned them, although it certainly felt like it.

The difference is in the perspective.

What we want comes from our temporary, worldly perspective, but God sees the end from the beginning.

The Israelites saw only endless years of slavery, but God prepared a Promised Land.

Esther saw a forced marriage to a king from another culture, but God planned a way to deliver his people from Haman’s threat.

The Jewish people saw the destruction of the temple, but God recognized the next two thousand years and the growth of His church.

The plan of God may not look the way we expect it to, but that is okay. The will of God has never really looked like we expect. His promises are better.

When the Israelites left Egypt their promise looked like a pillar of fire.

“The LORD went ahead of them. He guided them during the day with a pillar of cloud, and he provided light at night with a pillar of fire. This allowed them to travel by day or by night. And the LORD did not remove the pillar of cloud or pillar of fire from its place in front of the people.” – Exodus 13:21-22

It may not look the way we want it to or as we expect it to, but God is still there. God doesn’t change. The Bible says He is the same yesterday, today and forever. (Heb. 13:8)

That means, the pillar is still here.

My growing your faith challenge for you this week is to find a different perspective. Look outside of your circumstances to our God who is the Alpha and Omega… the Beginning and the End.

The Cloud who led Israel out of Egypt during the day and watched over them as a Pillar of Fire by night is still leading you. The Unseen Hand who positioned Esther right where she needed to be for such a time as this, is still placing us right where we need to be. And the One who gathered the Jewish people back from the ends of the earth to form the Holy Land once again, is still at work.

Man fails us. God does not.

I encourage you to meditate and rediscover that this week.